Tuesday, February 7, 2017

FBI ends email FOIA requests on Mar-1.

On March-1, the FBI will no longer accept Freedom of Information Requests by email (as they have done in hundreds of thousands of cases for years). Instead, users must revert to fax, postal mail, or an unreliable and privacy-unsettling web portal.

The FBI has repeatedly been charged with, and sued for, deliberately hindering the release of FOIA records in violation of the law. Ryan Shapiro, a PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has accused the FBI in court of deliberately utilizing antiquated technology for the purpose of impeding records requests. The agency is notorious for relying on outdated methods to search for records, despite having access more thorough and modern methods...

“The FBI does nearly everything within its power to avoid compliance with the Freedom of Information Act,” continued Shapiro, whose most recent FOIA project—“Operation 45”—is seeking records related to President Donald Trump. The result, as Shapiro describes it, is an “outrageous state of affairs in which the leading federal law enforcement agency in the country is in routine and often flagrant violation of federal law.”